Trump NIH Pick Pushed Ivermectin Conspiracy Theory in Documentary Linked to Chinese Cult

Jay Bhattacharya made remarks supportive of the discredited COVID treatment in a film released this year.

Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health promoted the long discredited COVID-19 treatment ivermectin in a conspiracy-filled documentary on the pandemic. The film, which was released earlier this year, was funded by a company linked to a Chinese cult.

Stanford University health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was announced last month as the president-elect’s choice to head up the NIH, appeared in a pseudo documentary that received funding from a company linked to the Chinese Falun Gong cult called Covid Collateral: Where Do We Go For Truth? In it, he appeared to endorse not only the use of ivermectin as a therapeutic for COVID, but an anti-vaccine conspiracy theory that its rejection by public health authorities was driven not by science, but instead by a desire to fast-track vaccine authorization.

Bhattacharya, who has advised both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on COVID policy, earned a reputation throughout the pandemic as a vocal contrarian, opposing mitigation measures while downplaying the dangers of infection and evangelizing “natural immunity” as the path to herd immunity. A favorite of right-wing media, dark money groups, and GOP politicians, he is best known for co-authoring the October 2020 pro-business, anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, which outlined his strategy. The document, published by a libertarian think tank, was widely derided for not being viable. Spurned by the mainstream of public health, Bhattacharya has painted himself as a victim of government censorship.

The professor’s controversial views and background have made his selection to lead the NIH controversial. Critics have noted that his anti-mitigation stances have led him to forge alliances with anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. He himself has questioned the safety and necessity of the COVID vaccines, particularly for young people and the previously infected, and suggested that the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, covered up COVID’s supposed laboratory origins.

But in Covid Collateral, the professor, who may soon head up the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, took his contrarianism into new territory. While the film rehashes ground he has extensively covered, such as his declaration and supposed silencing by the government, Bhattacharya’s commentary on ivermectin stands out as does the project’s funding—especially ahead of his potential confirmation hearing.

Bizarro History

Covid Collateral, released in May of this year, presents a bizarro history of the pandemic in which the government response was worse than the virus itself. The film suggests that the Chinese Community Party was the driving force behind lockdowns all over the world, fooling gullible or corrupt international health authorities with falsified data about China’s success in containing the virus. It makes the case that incurious scientists and a complicit media enabled devastating, unsupported lockdowns as well as the crushing of dissent by a malicious scientific establishment and power-hungry public health officials.

The narratives presented in Covid Collateral are familiar. The film is less a hard-hitting investigative review of the worst public health crisis in a century and more a Gish gallop of popular, dubious positions embraced by the political right throughout the pandemic. Sometimes, the narratives are even contradictory. For example, the film promotes the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was a dangerous laboratory experiment that leaked (evidence has consistently pointed to natural spillover, the explanation favored by a majority of epidemiologists and virologists) while also suggesting that most people never had anything to fear from it. But the ultimate message is simple: the contrarians were right.

Covid Collateral is best understood in the context of a years-long right-wing campaign to undermine the U.S. and global public health establishment—first to defeat pandemic mitigation measures seen as economically disruptive and ideologically threatening, and then to paper over the damage caused by the virus that was generally dismissed by right-wing contrarians like Bhattacharya as well as the continued threat.

To date, COVID has killed more than 1.2 million Americans, including caregivers of hundreds of thousands of children. The disease has been a top killer of young people and long COVID is estimated to affect millions of people—of all ages. Studies have linked the virus to a host of serious complications as well including heart, kidney, and neurological problems and diabetes.

Despite the damage and still-circulating virus, the U.S. has changed little in response to the crisis. COVID relief programs have all but expired and the country still lacks a national healthcare system, universal paid leave, and universal workplace safety rules to mitigate the risk of airborne transmission.

Unproven Treatment

One of Covid Collateral’s misleading storylines is that viable early treatments—specifically anti-parasitic drug ivermectin—were suppressed in order to get the emergency use authorizations for COVID vaccines. While the claim is popular on the right, an Associated Press fact check from December 2022 noted that it was baseless. There is nothing in federal law preventing emergency use authorization for a vaccine when a treatment is available.

Presenting the false narrative in the documentary are Bhattacharya and Dr. Paul Marik, co-founder of the ivermectin-promoting group Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Marik’s FLCCC co-founder Dr. Pierre Kory helped popularize ivermectin after Trump’s “game changer” hydroxychloroquine proved to be a dud (the original paper behind the hydroxychloroquine craze has finally been retracted on ethical and scientific grounds).

At a Senate hearing chaired by Trump ally Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Kory called ivermectin a “miracle drug.” In the wake of the hearing, the anti-parasitic exploded in popularity, especially in MAGA World, resulting in a surge of poisonings as people began taking doses preemptively. These stories prompted the FDA to put out social media posts warning against the drug’s use. The posts seized on ivermectin’s use as a dewormer for livestock. One viral tweet read, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

The posts outraged right-wing believers and anti-vaxxers, who took offense at the suggestion that ivermectin had no approved uses in humans. A number of contrarian doctors, including Marik, even sued the FDA. The agency eventually deleted the posts but admitted no wrongdoing.

High quality studies have repeatedly demonstrated that ivermectin is not effective against COVID. However, that did not stop Bhattacharya and Marik from criticizing public health authorities for discouraging its use in 2024’s Covid Collateral.

(The above video is featured in reliance of Fair Use.)

“There were a lot of doctors who work at the front line that were treating patients with drugs like ivermectin,” Bhattacharya told the off-camera interviewer. “From whatever reason, the powers that be decided that anyone who thought that inexpensive drugs like ivermectin might be effective were doing tremendous damage to patients by recommending this therapy.”

The professor went on to note how the press had published stories about people overdosing on veterinary ivermectin—ostensibly as part of the campaign against the drug by those “powers that be.” Later, he claimed that ivermectin’s use as a COVID treatment posed a threat to the vaccines.

“It makes it more difficult to get the vaccine approved in a regulatory way because if there’s a known effective treatment, you can’t just do an emergency use,” he said.

(The above video is featured in reliance of Fair Use.)

Marik, meanwhile, called ivermectin “a big threat,” incorrectly declaring that had the drug “proved to be an effective drug for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the vaccination program would have been deemed null-and-void.”

Dark Money

Covid Collateral is the most recent project of Canadian producer and filmmaker Vanessa Dylyn, who runs the company Matter of Fact Media. According to its website, funding for the feature came from two notable sources: the Canada Media Fund, a Canadian public-private partnership, and NTD Television, which stands for New Tang Dynasty, an American broadcasting outfit.

NTD is part of Epoch Media Group, which is also behind The Epoch Times, a far-right, pro-Trump, conspiracy-peddling newspaper started by followers of the Chinese Falun Gong cult. Earlier this year, the paper, which has become a favorite of the anti-vaccine movement, was marred by money laundering charges against its top executives.

Multiple “key experts” in Covid Collateral have ties to The Epoch Times. Bhattacharya, for example, is a contributor to the publication. In October, he hosted one of its senior editors, Jan Jekialek, at a controversial pandemic policy conference he organized at Stanford.

Jekielek hosts an Epoch Times television program called American Thought Leaders, which has featured prominent figures in the anti-vax movement. He was recently in the news for co-hosting a separate Epoch Times show with conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, who Trump picked to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation in his next administration.

Other Epoch Times contributors who appear in Covid Collateral as key experts include Marik, veteran right-wing political operative Jeffrey Tucker, former Trump administration COVID adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, and attorney Jenin Younes.

Through these individuals, the film is also linked to various right-wing dark money groups (besides The Epoch Times Association, which is affiliated with the media company). Tucker, for example, was one of the organizers of the Great Barrington Declaration while working as editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank that has received funding from right-wing powerbroker Charles Koch. He is also the founder of the Brownstone Institute, which he founded to prevent the return of lockdowns and wage an information war on public health. Brownstone lists The Epoch Times, NTD, and Marik’s FLCCC as “friends” on its website.

Atlas, meanwhile, who also assisted in the planning stages of the declaration, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think tank housed at Stanford. Younes, present at the declaration’s signing, is a litigation counsel at New Civil Liberties Alliance, a dark money, anti-regulation lawfare group that has received significant funding from Koch. Notably, she represented Bhattacharya in his failed lawsuit against the Biden administration for allegedly orchestrating his social media censorship.

Two months after Covid Collateral’s release, the right-wing Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Koch and has received funding from groups in his orbit for years, hosted a screening of the documentary in Washington. The showing was accompanied by a panel discussion featuring Dylyn, Bhattacharya, and Trump’s former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Dr. Robert Redfield.